Twenty years after the overthrow of communist rule in Poland, Adrian Bridge
asks Lech Walesa if he's happy with the result.

The trademark walrus moustache is still in place, though these days it is a distinguished shade of grey and rather better manicured than it once was. And there's no mistaking its owner: Lech Walesa, the electrician whose fiery rhetoric ignited the shipworkers of the Polish port of Gdansk and lit the fuse that led to the toppling 20 years ago this autumn of the communist regimes that for so long had ruled with a vice-like grip from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

This month, the Great Electrician (Walesa's job at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk) has had cause to reflect on his life's work. Exactly 20 years ago, Poland became the first country in Eastern Europe since the Second World War to have a non-Communist prime minister, in the shape of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, following the resounding victory of Walesa's Solidarity movement in elections earlier in the summer.

We have just passed the 20th anniversary of another important first: the opening of the Iron Curtain during the course of a pan‑European "picnic" at the border crossing between Hungary and Austria, close to the town of Sopron. The frontier was open for just a few hours but several hundred alert East Germans seized the opportunity to flee to the West. Although the barriers were briefly reinstated, there was no turning back: over the next four months the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe rose to topple their communist masters.

Walesa likes to take a lot of the credit for what happened in 1989, and it is undeniably true that the oppressed of Eastern Europe were inspired by the man who stood up to Poland's communist rulers and forced them into a series of previously unthinkable concessions, notably the right to belong to a free trade union. There were setbacks – in particular the imposition of martial law in December 1981, followed by the suppression of Solidarity and the imprisonment of Walesa himself. But a force had been unleashed that, almost 10 years later, would reach fruition in the glorious autumn of 1989, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The famous moustache is the first thing I register as Walesa leaps from his chauffeur‑driven car, open laptop in hand, at the entrance to the VIP lounge at the aptly named Lech Walesa Gdansk airport, from which he is about to head off for another foreign lecture tour (his main occupation these days). Now 65 and somewhat portlier than in his communist-bashing heyday, he looks like a man who is still in a hurry, and initially I am told we will have only 10 minutes. "First question?" he says, abruptly cutting off the interpreter's introductory niceties.

Well, 20 years on, is this what you had in mind? Have you achieved what you set out to achieve? "If someone had told me when I was young where we would be now I would not have believed them, and these changes – even if they came at the cost of beatings and torture – have definitely been worth it. We have achieved tremendous things," he says. Not as much as he would have liked, however.

"My duty was to fight and to conquer and that is what I did," he says. "But the changes could have been better. Think about the scale of what we did here. It would be like you in Britain switching from driving on the left to driving on the right. We have changed from left to right and the cost was tremendous."

After the euphoria of 1989 came the cold reality of economic adjustment as people working in previously protected but unviable state enterprises were thrown out of work. The economic hardship left many hankering after the comforting – if hugely restrictive – certainties of the old regime. Walesa growls and wags his finger accusingly (it is easy to see why he was such an effective negotiator).

"If [Western] Europe had taken us in earlier, it would have been much better. But by keeping us waiting so long [Poland was finally admitted to the European Union in May 2004], the price we had to pay was much heavier. I would have liked the EU to have come up with a Marshall Plan for the countries of the East. Unfortunately, nothing of this sort happened. We were left all alone."

Walesa is still smarting over the fact that, having served as the country's first non-communist president from 1990 to 1995, he then discovered, as Churchill did in 1945, the harsh realities of democracy when the Polish electorate declined to re-elect him for a second term, preferring instead Aleksander Kwasniewski, a more polished operator who had served under the communists. While he had been a brilliant destroyer of communism, the Great Electrician, the Polish people decided, lacked the skills, education and credibility necessary to lead them on the international stage.

Walesa, who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1983, was mocked for the inconsistency (as president his catchphrase was "I am both for and against") and the John Prescott-like incomprehensibility of his pronouncements: "The country needs political balance; the government is its left leg, the parliament is its right leg and I am in between." There were also dark, but never properly substantiated, suggestions that he had once informed for Poland's secret services.

An attempt to re-enter the fray in the presidential election of December 2000 ended ignominiously with Walesa garnering just 1 per cent of the vote.

He growls again. "The changes could have been better, and they would have been if it had been up to me," he says. "I would have got much better terms for our entry to the EU. But I did my job; now the nation does what it wants."

No one would deny that the past 20 years have been difficult, or that many Poles are still challenged by the new order; but the fruits of the revolution set in motion by Walesa and the strikers of the Lenin Shipyard are clear to see. A younger generation of Poles has embraced the entrepreneurial spirit, new businesses have been created and wealth generated. On the streets of Gdansk, where once there were tatty shops with empty shelves, there are now glitzy malls and classy cafés. There may not have been as much as Walesa would have liked, but EU money has flowed into Poland.

Since retiring from front-line politics, Walesa has enjoyed spending more time in Gdansk with his wife of almost 40 years, Danuta, and their eight children and 10 grandchildren. A devout Roman Catholic who drew great inspiration from his fellow Pole, Pope John Paul II, he spends more time with his church. Yet despite his achievements, he still seems restless. He enjoys being feted by the great and the good around the world and sees it as his mission to usher in a new form of "globalisation" in which old-fashioned thinking about nation states is replaced with a more fluid notion of equal-ranking states, in which people can move more freely and frequently.

Later, I return to the shipyards Walesa made famous and watch as people place flowers at the foot of the three crosses erected to mark the 44 people killed in the 1970 strikes and wander around the nearby Roads to Freedom exhibition detailing the momentous events of 1989. Walesa, too, sometimes returns to the shipyards. He was there earlier this summer to take part in a celebratory evening, incongruously starring Kylie Minogue, to mark the anniversary of Solidarity's victory in the 1989 election. Symbolically, he pushed over a giant-sized domino, setting in motion a line of similar dominoes marked with the names of the countries that, 20 years ago this autumn, overthrew their communist regimes: Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania.

There was a loud cheer. Then, just like old times, the Great Electrician addressed the crowd. "Whether your lives are going well or badly, let's celebrate this moment," he said. "Because if you don't like your situation, you are free to try to change it. We were not."